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Austerity, uncertainty, instability … all problems we associate with Europe today as it cycles from pre-GFC exuberance to today’s austerity. But to put things in perspective, these are minor problems compared what our grandparents endured after World War Two. In Britain many people did not have enough to eat, the government had secret plans for national catastrophe, the Cold War was raging, the colonies erupting, and Sterling was in crisis. In those days there were few policy economists, and macroeconomics was caught in a battle between non-interventionist classical economics and the Keynesian revolution of demand management.

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  MORE things to do and get signed at NYCC, with lots ofr preveiws of Abrams Spring 2016 line all at booth #2228 and 2016 Abrams calendars with every purchase over $50.00 while supplies last (limited one per customer). And advance copies of the above book about Alan Turing by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis.  Advance […]

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Oscar-winning screenwriter Graham Moore (pictured, via) has landed a deal for his second novel with Random House.

The publisher plans to release The Last Days of Wonder in Fall 2016. Senior editor Noah Eaker negotiated the terms of the agreement with ICM Partners agent Jennifer Joel.

Here’s more from Deadline: “Sticking to the historical thriller bent of Alan Turing’s story in Imitation Game, Wonder is set against the backdrop of 1880s New York and centers on the legal battle over the invention of the light bulb pitting Thomas Edison against George Westinghouse. The story is told through the eyes of Westinghouse’s young attorney, Paul Cravath (later the founding partner of the prestigious law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore), and focuses on his efforts against enormous odds to win his case for his client.”

Many have praised Moore for a moving acceptance speech he gave while accepting the Academy Award in the best adapted screenplay category earlier this year. Click here to watch a video with Moore encouraging those who feel like different to “stay weird.”

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SPOILERS: If you don’t know the story of Alan Turing and want to remain completely in the dark in regards to the plot of The Imitation Game, probably don’t read this.

As a dedicated Cumberbitch, of course I had to see The Imitation Game, in which my boyfriend Benedict Cumberbatch portrays genius and father of the modern computer Alan Turing.

Turing was a British mathematician, cryptographer, and marathon runner who helped break the Nazi Enigma code to bring an early cessation to World War II. The machine he used to break the code, “Christopher,” is the precursor to technology we use everyday, whether it be a computer or smart phone.

Post-war, Turing was found guilty of gross indecency, due to his homosexuality (a crime at the time) and sentenced to two years chemical castration through oestrogen injections in order to dissolve his libido. Due perhaps to the effects of the oestrogen, he killed himself at the age of forty-one.

Turing was never ashamed of his sexuality. He died a genius and a homosexual who has since been recognized for his accomplishments and for the unfortunate turn his life took as a gay male in the super paranoid 1950s.

The film, Imitation Game, follows Turing’s entire life through flashes into his past at boarding school, his present at Bletchley Park during World War II, and into his sad, horrible future, during the process of his chemical castration when he seemed ready to lose his mind.

Cumberbatch was ideally cast in the role of this awkward genius. He brings comedy, heart, and charisma to a man whose own mother called him “an odd duck.” The supporting cast is similarly enthralling, led by Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode (and a truly heart-wrenching portrayal by lesser-known Matthew Beard).

Screenwriter Graham Moore deserves every award possible for his flawless movement through time, choosing the moments in Alan’s life that shaped him the most. And I’d be remiss to not mention director Morten Tyldum, who guided and shaped the film into an emotional rollercoaster of joy, tragedy, and rage.

Cumberbatch has admitted he did not leave filming unscathed. During one scene, for instance, he had to portray Turing having an emotional breakdown. Surprise, surprise, Cumberbatch actually had a breakdown and couldn’t finish the scene.

He told the Los Angeles Daily News, “I just got completely lost in his tragedy. I tried to pace myself for the scene, but I could not stop crying. I could not stop keening for this guy who was wronged. It disgusted and profoundly upset me.” As an audience member, I felt the same about Turing’s fate.

The film is brilliant in execution. The performances are spot-on. More than that, though, The Imitation Game informs people of what happened to Alan Turing and what happened to so many men like him in the first half of the twentieth century.

Gay men were once the drug dealers of today. They were persecuted and imprisoned for their “crime” (sexual preference). Can you image that happening now? No, but that doesn’t mean we’re in any way out of the woods where gay rights are concerned.

A dear friend of mine was recently attacked via an online discussion board at her college. Fellow students found out she was gay and offered to help her. They wanted to take her someplace where she could be “healed.” They wanted her to know she could be fixed, but as I told her, “Honey, you can’t fix stupid.” We still live surrounded by ignorance, and no matter how well intentioned, my friend’s fellow students really hurt her feelings.

Steps have been taken to stop discrimination against gays. Gay marriage is being allowed in more and more states around the country. We’re certainly not putting people away for sodomy anymore. (Half the straight population would probably be behind bars, too.) But there is still a long way to go for more than just gays—for the rights of all races, sexes, and creeds.

The Imitation Game is really about choices: choose who you love, choose who you save, and choose who you want to be. Finally, choose to accept the way you were born.

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Prometheus, a Titan god, was exiled from Mount Olympus by Zeus because he stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. He was condemned, punished, and chained to a rock while eagles ate at his liver. His name, in ancient Greek, means “forethinker “and literary history lauds him as a prophetic hero who rebels against his society to help man progress. The stolen fire is symbolic of creative powers and scientific knowledge. His theft encompasses risk, unintended consequences, and tragedy. Centuries later, modern times has another Promethean hero, Alan Turing. Like the Greek Titan before him, Turing suffers for his foresight and audacity to rebel.

The riveting film, The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum and staring Benedict Cumberbatch, offers us a portrait of Alan Turing that few of us knew before. After this peak into his extraordinary life, we wonder, how is it possible that within our lifetime, society could condemn to eternal punishment such a special person? Turing accepts his tragic fate and blames himself.

“I am not normal,” he confesses to his ex-fiancée, Joan Clarke.

“Normal?” she responds, angrily. “Could a normal man have shortened World War ll by two years and have saved 16 million people?”

The Turing machine, the precursor to the computer, is the result of his “not normal” mind. His obsession was to solve the greatest enigma of his time – to decode Nazi war messages.

In the film, as the leader of a team of cryptologists at Bletchley Park in 1940, Turing’s Bombe deciphered coded messages where German U-boats would decimate British ships. In 1943, the Colossus machine, built by engineer Tommy Flowers of the group, was able to decode messages directly from Hitler.

The movie, The Imitation Game, while depicting the life of an extraordinary person, also raises philosophical questions, not only about artificial intelligence, but what it is to be human. Cumberbatch’s Turing recognizes the danger of his invention. He feared what would happen if a thinking machine is programmed to replace a man; if a robot is processed by artificial intelligence and not by a human being who has a conscience, a soul, a heart.

Einstein experienced a similar dilemma. His theory of relativity created great advances in physics and scientific achievement, but also had tragic consequences – the development of the atomic bomb.

The Imitation Game will open Pandora’s box. Viewers will ponder on what the film passed over quickly. Who was a Russian spy? Why did Churchill not trust Stalin? What was the role of the Americans during this period of decrypting military codes? How did Israel get involved?

And viewers will want to know more about Alan Turing. Did Turing really commit suicide by biting into an apple laced with cyanide? Or does statistical probability tell us that Turing knew too much about too many things and perhaps too many people wanted him silent? This will be an enigma to decode.

The greatest crime from a sociological perspective, is the one committed by humanity against a unique individual because he is different. The Imitation Game will make us all ashamed of society’s crime of being prejudiced. Alan Turing stole fire from the gods to give to man power and knowledge. While doing so, he showed he was very human. And society condemned him for being so.

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I grew up in a house which lived and breathed mathematics. I was quick at numbers and happy with algebra as it contained letters and therefore writing. But maths was not my strength so it was nigh on impossible to participate in the family past time.
We lived in Hayes, Middlesex, in a small house, in an ordinary street. But inside our house, extraordinary stuff was going on.
I went back to visit this year and in the photo you can just see my old bedroom window, jutting out above the lawn behind me.

My older brother  and my father sat at the dinner table every night and talked maths for hours. I was reading on the floor in front of the fire. Words filtered down to me  - quantum mechanics, relativity, theorems ( I liked Pythagoras - history was my passion including history of maths), calculus, the atom, the splitting of the atom, anything really to do with the atom.


Then there were all the people - men really - Einstein, Newton, Archimedes - lots of history there. So without really understanding the maths, I was growing up in a home which would give me a backdrop to feed my imagination, my vocabulary, my world view and my thirst for knowledge. This has never left me and I believe it has been a huge influence on my writing.

Fast forward to 2007. My younger brother, Louis Berk, a keen amateur photographer,( who was much better at maths than me) tells me that we should visit Bletchley Park before it gets properly discovered. Louis reckons our Dad was receiving decoded messages from Bletchley when he drove his radio car around France after D-Day. For quite sometime he was the only link between the British and American lines and got a letter from Eisenhower. I think he's wearing his driving gloves in the photo. He never took a driving test. Just got told to drive round the parade ground until he got the hang of it and then off he went.


One of Dad's hobbies was designing circuits and after he died we framed one and hung it on the wall. He drew the circuits with pencils he sharpened with a Stanley knife. He loved sharpening pencils and I always had a box full of fiercely sharpened pencils for school every day. No wonder I became a writer!



Louis was absolutely right. Bletchley Park was practically empty. We wandered around the huts which looked like the code breakers had literally just walked out the door and took photos. It was like stepping back seventy years. These photos were taken by Louis.







These photos were taken by me - you can see the difference!







I was inspired to write this post after seeing the film The Imitation Game about the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, cracking the German code and shortening the WW2 by two years. They saved 14 million lives. But everyone who worked there stayed silent for decades. This film is about mathematics at its most extreme.

I loved every minute of it. I had learnt at my father's knee, you don't have to know about maths to be inspired by it. My imagination might not have solved black holes but it can soar as far as I need it to and beyond. Growing up in quantum mechanics - what gorgeous words - taught me how to think outside the box and that's what every writer needs.


www.miriamhalahmy.com

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Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was a mathematician and computer scientist, remembered for his revolutionary Automatic Computing Engine, on which the first personal computer was based, and his crucial role in breaking the ENIGMA code during the Second World War. He continues to be regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

We live in an age that Turing both predicted and defined. His life and achievements are starting to be celebrated in popular culture, largely with the help of the newly released film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke. We’re proud to publish some of Turing’s own work in mathematics, computing, and artificial intelligence, as well as numerous explorations of his life and work. Use our interactive Enigma Machine below to learn more about Turing’s extraordinary achievements.

 

Image credits: (1) Bletchley Park Bombe by Antoine Taveneaux. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Alan Turing Aged 16, Unknown Artist. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Good question by Garrett Coakley. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr. 

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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending October 12, 2014–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #2 in Hardcover Fiction) Lila by Marilynne Robinson: “Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church—the only available shelter from the rain—and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.” (October 2014)

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The Weinstein Company has unveiled an official trailer for The Imitation Game. This film adaptation is based on Andrew Hodges’ biography Alan Turing: The Enigma.

The video embedded above offers glimpses of star actor Benedict Cumberbatch as the famous logician and computer scientist. Novelist Graham Moore penned the script.

According to Deadline, the story “centers on Turing and his team’s race against time to break the Enigma code at Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park facility.” This movie will hit theaters on November 21, 2014.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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By Luciano Floridi

When we use a computer, its performance seems to degrade progressively. This is not a mere impression. An old version of Firefox, the free Web browser, was infamous for its “memory leaks”: it would consume increasing amounts of memory to the detriment of other programs. Bugs in the software actually do slow down the system. We all know what the solution is: reboot. We restart the computer, the memory is reset, and the performance is restored, until the bugs slow it down again.

Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops. The world may be undergoing a revolution, but the philosophical discourse remains detached and utterly oblivious. Time to reboot the system.

Philosophical “rebooting” moments are rare. They are usually prompted by major transformations in the surrounding reality. Since the nineties, I have been arguing that we are witnessing one of those moments. It now seems obvious, even to the most conservative person, that we are experiencing a turning point in our history. The information revolution is profoundly changing every aspect of our lives, quickly and relentlessly. The list is known but worth recalling: education and entertainment, communication and commerce, love and hate, politics and conflicts, culture and health, … feel free to add your preferred topics; they are all transformed by technologies that have the recording and processing of information as their core functions. Meanwhile, philosophy is degrading into self-referential discussions on irrelevancies.

The result of a philosophical rebooting today can only be beneficial. Digital technologies are not just tools merely modifying how we deal with the world, like the wheel or the engine. They are above all formatting systems, which increasingly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with each other.

The ‘Fourth Revolution’ betrays what I believe to be one of the topics that deserves our full intellectual attention today. The idea is quite simple. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact on how we see ourselves. In changing our understanding of the external world they also modified our self-understanding. After the Copernican revolution, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the universe. The Darwinian revolution showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. And following Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious. So we are not immobile, at the centre of the universe, we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom, and we are very far from being minds entirely transparent to ourselves. One may easily question the value of this classic picture. After all, Freud was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature and his perspective was blatantly self-serving. But replace Freud with cognitive science or neuroscience, and we can still find the framework useful to explain our strong impression that something very significant and profound has recently happened to our self-understanding.

Since the fifties, computer science and digital technologies have been changing our conception of who we are. In many respects, we are discovering that we are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational agents, sharing with other biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of information, the infosphere. If we need a champion for the fourth revolution this should definitely be Alan Turing.

The fourth revolution offers a historical opportunity to rethink our exceptionalism in at least two ways. Our intelligent behaviour is confronted by the smart behaviour of engineered artefacts, which can be adaptively more successful in the infosphere. Our free behaviour is confronted by the predictability and manipulability of our choices, and by the development of artificial autonomy. Digital technologies sometimes seem to know more about our wishes than we do. We need philosophy to make sense of the radical changes brought about by the information revolution. And we need it to be at its best, for the difficulties we are facing are challenging. Clearly, we need to reboot philosophy now.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He was recently appointed as ethics advisor to Google. His most recent book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality.

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Image credit: Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park. By Ian Petticrew. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Philip Carter

2012 — What a year to be British!

A year of street parties and river processions for the Jubilee; of officially the best Olympics ever; of opening and closing ceremonies; of Britons winning every medal on offer; of the (admittedly, not British) Tour de France, of David Hockney’s Yorkshire; and of a new James Bond film. Even a first tennis Grand Slam since the days when shorts were trousers and players answered to ‘Bunny’. If asked for the people of 2012 you’d obviously opt for Wiggins, Boyle, Farah, Ennis, Craig, Murray and, of course, Her Majesty the Queen, complete with parachute.

At the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography we too have delighted in these achievements. But, as our remit demands, we’ve also spent this year looking further back at some of the historical Britons celebrated or commemorated during 2012. As the year comes to a close, here are a few highlights — a look back, if you will, on looking back.

It’s been a strong year for anniversaries. We began in February with what’s proved the biggest and longest-running of these celebrations: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens about whom so much has been said and done in 2012. Other bicentenaries are available, however. In addition to the mighty ‘Boz’, the Oxford DNB includes a further 242 men and women born in 1812. A few did gain some recognition, notably the poets Robert Browning (born 7 May 1812) and Edward Lear, whose birthday fell a week later, but neither could compete with the Our Mutual Friend.

Any smaller and you were submerged in a Dickensian backwash. Thus only a handful of parties for the great Gothic architect Augustus Pugin (1 March) or the Russian-born radical and Anglophile, Alexander Herzen (6 April [New Style]), and probably nothing at all for these two gems from the ODNB list. First, Samuel Isaac (1812-1886) who, despite having ‘no engineering experience’, accepted an invitation to undertake and underwrite the building of the Mersey Tunnel — what’s more successfully (it opened in February 1885). Then there’s Henry James Jones (1812-1891), Bristol baker and ‘the inventor of self-raising flour’ — surely a man deserving a little more recognition in the year of Boz. No Henry James Jones (or yeast) means no fluffy loaf, however Great your Expectations.

Popular anniversaries often highlight artistic or cultural, rather than science-related, episodes from our past. 2012 was a bit different in that it saw celebrations (in June) for the centenary of the mathematician, Alan Turing (1912-1954). Turing’s appeal is due in part to the near universal reach of his work — even if the details of The Turing Machine, and later developments in computer science, leave most of us baffled. There’s also his wartime association with Bletchley Park where he spearheaded the breaking of the German Enigma and Fish codes. But Turing also catches the imagination for his (then) unusual openness towards his sexuality, his arrest and controversial punishment for indecency, his curious death, and the ongoing campaign to have him granted a posthumous pardon.

Turing was rightly deserving of the anniversary events held in 2012, though — as the Oxford DNB again shows — he wasn’t alone among scientific centenarians. In fact, the dictionary offers a further 29 men and women born in 1912 and now remembered for their contributions to scientific and medical fields. They include some remarkable lives: among them the astronomer George Alcock (born 28 August) — who discovered five comets (a British record) and boasted a photographic memory of 30,000 stars — and cardiologist Bill Cleland (30 May), the pioneer of open heart surgery in Britain in the early 1950s. Centenary science (albeit of a much less robust kind) is also marked this month, indeed this week, with the 100th anniversary of the public unveiling of Piltdown Man. Discovered in Sussex, these bone fragments were dated by their finder, Charles Dawson, to 4 million BC and identified as the ‘missing link’ between apes and man. The announcement, made on 18 December 1912, caused a sensation. For four decades Piltdown Man — or Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson’s Dawn Man — enjoyed the status of Europe’s oldest known human. Then, in the 1950s, Piltdown was revealed for what he really was: parts of a relatively recent human skull mingled with bones from a small orangutan. In December, therefore, we remember a 100 year-old hoax.

2012 was also a year for looking back at some dramatic, indeed shocking, events. Charles Dickens was just three months old when, on 11 May 1812, the prime minister Spencer Perceval was shot and killed in the Commons lobby — the first and only British premier to suffer this fate. His assailant was John Bellingham, a bankrupt commercial agent who was arrested, tried, and hanged within the week.

On 18 May 1912, exactly 100 years after Bellingham’s execution, 30,000 people gathered in Colne, Lancashire, for the funeral of a local man, Wallace Hartley, a former ship’s musician. So many gathered because that ship was the RMS Titanic, captained by Edward Smith who with Hartley, and more than 1500 others, lost their lives on 15 April 1912. The Titanic disaster — undoubtedly the anniversary event of the year — came within weeks of an equally celebrated episode in popular histories of Britishness. On 19 March 1912 Captain Robert Scott and his two surviving companions pitched their tent for the final time. It was three months since their ‘defeat’ at the South Pole, and three days since their fellow explorer Captain Oates had walked to his death. The men got no further, with Scott the last to die on about 29 March. Looking back from 2012 the tragedies of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ and the Titanic come in quick succession, a severe blow to Edwardian self-confidence seemingly delivered in the spring of 1912. A centenary ago the chronology was, of course, a little different: not until November 1912 did a search team confirm the deaths of Scott and his party, and it took a further three months for news of this disaster to reach London.

In the coming decades, delays of this kind would become a thing of the past. And last month the BBC marked the 90th anniversary of the reason why: the institution’s first radio broadcast, an event that would soon bring new sounds, voices, opinions, and information into millions of homes. At the helm on 14 November 1922 was the imperious John Reith, manager of what was then the British Broadcasting Company. At the microphone, Arthur Burrows, who announced the results of the general election: Mr Bonar Law 332, David Lloyd George 127.

If you missed Dickens, Turing, Perceval, and Piltdown Man, and would like to get involved there is still time. Between now and the year end why not hold a do-it-yourself celebration for the author of Self-Help, Samuel Smiles (born 23 December 1812)? Or throw a ‘happening’ for the centenary of Birmingham surrealist, Conroy Maddox (27 December)? In a striking coming together of dates, 12 December is also the 150th anniversary of J. Bruce Ismay’s birth. The owner of the White Star shipping line, Ismay is now remembered for his controversial escape from his greatest ship — the RMS Titanic.

And the future? A quick search of the Oxford DNB reveals many reasons to celebrate and commemorate in 2013. Take, for instance, the quatercentenary of library founder Thomas Bodley; the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice; the 150th anniversary of the London Underground; 100 years of British film censorship; 50 years since Kim Philby’s flight to Russia; Britain’s 40 years in the European Union; or 20 years since the death of Audrey Hepburn. And that’s just January.

Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 165 life stories now available (including the lives of Alan Turing, Piltdown Man, Wallace Hartley, and Captain Scott). You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.

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By Jack Copeland

Three words to sum up Alan Turing? Humour. He had an impish, irreverent and infectious sense of humour. Courage. Isolation. He loved to work alone. Reading his scientific papers, it is almost as though the rest of the world — the busy community of human minds working away on the same or related problems — simply did not exist. Turing was determined to do it his way. Three more words? A patriot. Unconventional — he was uncompromisingly unconventional, and he didn’t much care what other people thought about his unusual methods. A genius. Turing’s brilliant mind was sparsely furnished, though. He was a Spartan in all things, inner and outer, and had no time for pleasing décor, soft furnishings, superfluous embellishment, or unnecessary words. To him what mattered was the truth. Everything else was mere froth. He succeeded where a better furnished, wordier, more ornate mind might have failed. Alan Turing changed the world.

What would it have been like to meet him? Turing was tallish (5 feet 10 inches) and broadly built. He looked strong and fit. You might have mistaken his age, as he always seemed younger than he was. He was good looking, but strange. If you came across him at a party you would notice him all right. In fact you might turn round and say “Who on earth is that?” It wasn’t just his shabby clothes or dirty fingernails. It was the whole package. Part of it was the unusual noise he made. This has often been described as a stammer, but it wasn’t. It was his way of preventing people from interrupting him, while he thought out what he was trying to say. Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah. He did it loudly.

If you crossed the room to talk to him, you’d probably find him gauche and rather reserved. He was decidedly lah-di-dah, but the reserve wasn’t standoffishness. He was a man of few words, shy. Polite small talk did not come easily to him. He might if you were lucky smile engagingly, his blue eyes twinkling, and come out with something quirky that would make you laugh. If conversation developed you’d probably find him vivid and funny. He might ask you, in his rather high-pitched voice, whether you think a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream, or could make you fall in love with it. Or he might ask if you can say why a face is reversed left to right in a mirror but not top to bottom.

Once you got to know him Turing was fun — cheerful, lively, stimulating, comic, brimming with boyish enthusiasm. His raucous crow-like laugh pealed out boisterously. But he was also a loner. “Turing was always by himself,” said codebreaker Jerry Roberts: “He didn’t seem to talk to people a lot, although with his own circle he was sociable enough.” Like everyone else Turing craved affection and company, but he never seemed to quite fit in anywhere. He was bothered by his own social strangeness — although, like his hair, it was a force of nature he could do little about. Occasionally he could be very rude. If he thought that someone wasn’t listening to him with sufficient attention he would simply walk away. Turing was the sort of man who, usually unintentionally, ruffled people’s feathers — especially pompous people, people in authority, and scientific poseurs. He was moody too. His assistant at the National Physical Laboratory, Jim Wilkinson, recalled with amusement that there were days when it was best just to keep out of Turing’s way. Beneath the cranky, craggy, irreverent exterior there was an unworldly innocence though, as well as sensitivity and modesty.

Turing died at the age of only 41. His ideas lived on, however, and at the turn of the millennium Time magazine listed him among the twentieth century’s 100 greatest minds, alongside the Wright brothers, Albert Einstein, DNA busters Crick and Watson, and the discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming. Turing’s achievements during his short life were legion. Best known as the man who broke some of Germany’s most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also the father of the modern computer. Today, all who click, tap or touch to open are familiar with the impact of his ideas. To Turing we owe the brilliant innovation of storing applications, and all the other programs necessary for computers to do our bidding, inside the computer’s memory, ready to be opened when we wish. We take for granted that we use the same slab of hardware to shop, manage our finances, type our memoirs, play our favourite music and videos, and send instant messages across the street or around the world. Like many great ideas this one now seems as obvious as the wheel and the arch, but with this single invention — the stored-program universal computer — Turing changed the way we live. His universal machine caught on like wildfire; today personal computer sales hover around the million a day mark. In less than four decades, Turing’s ideas transported us from an era where ‘computer’ was the term for a human clerk who did the sums in the back office of an insurance company or science lab, into a world where many young people have never known life without the Internet.

B. Jack Copeland is the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, and author of Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain, and Colossus. He is the editor of The Essential Turing. Read the new revelations about Turing’s death after Copeland’s investigation into the inquest.

Visit the Turing hub on the Oxford University Press UK website for the latest news in theCentenary year. Read our previous posts on Alan Turing including: “Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing” by Peter J. Bentley, “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott, “Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy” by Keith M. Martin, and “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens, “Computers as authors and the Turing Test” by Kees van Deemter, and “Alan Turing, Code-Breaker” by Jack Copeland.

For more information about Turing’s codebreaking work, and to view digital facsimiles of declassified wartime ‘Ultra’ documents, visit The Turing Archive for the History of Computing. There is also an extensive photo gallery of Turing and his war at www.the-turing-web-book.com.

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By Peter J Bentley

What better way to spend an afternoon than having a friendly chat? My three friends are online chatbots – Artificial Intelligence software designed to analyse my sentences and respond accordingly. All I do is visit a specific webpage, then type into a box in my Internet browser and they reply, just like chatting online to a human. These three (jabberwacky, iGod and ALICE) are some of the more advanced chatbots out there, the result of decades of research by computer scientists to try and achieve intelligence in a computer. From the birth of computers until now, we’ve been trying to make a digital brain that’s clever enough to have a conversation with us. The best we can manage is really nothing more than a database of facts, some basic knowledge of grammar, and a lot of symbol-processing – shuffling of words around in an attempt to find some kind of coherent response. Here’s what we said to each other this afternoon.

Conversation 1:

Me: Hello.

Jabberwacky: Hello, how are you?

Me: I would like to have a chat with you about your parents. Would that be OK?

Jabberwacky: What would you like to chat about?

Me: Did you know that Alan Turing would be 100 years old this year, had he lived?

Jabberwacky: That is very interesting. Do you know that the Philippines has 7100 islands?

Me: I did not know that. However, let’s talk about Turing a little more. You know that Turing suggested something called the Turing Test?

Jabberwacky: No, I did not know that the cat was red…

Me: Right. Well, this was Turing’s way of thinking about how we might judge whether we were talking to an intelligent computer. If we can’t tell the difference between chatting to a computer and chatting to a person, the computer passes the Turing Test. It is intelligent, so Turing suggested.

Jabberwacky: We could all be a figment of imagination of some old guy living in an insane asylum if you think about it.

Me: Yes, I guess that might be true. Anyway, the foresight shown by Turing is remarkable. He was thinking of these ideas at the time that computers were still the size of a large room, and could perform just basic computations compared to today’s machines.

Jabberwacky: Well this must be the part of the film where the noted inception noise comes in.

Me: That might be an appropriate soundtrack for this conversation, you are right. But this is not science fiction, this is computer science fact. It’s a little sad that Turing predicted: “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Jabberwacky: Why do you think Jesus is not your savior?

Me: Uh. Anyway, my point is that Turing, for all his genius, did not get this one right. He was not the only one to be overambitious – other pioneers also thought Artificial Intelligence would be achievable much more easily.

Jabberwacky: Who told you that.

Me: Well, recently I wrote a book called Digitized. It’s about the history of computers and I was lucky enough to interview many pioneers for the book. They told me.

Jabberwacky: And what is their history?

Me: I interviewed John Holland – he worked with his supervisor on John von Neumann’s final papers. Holland also got the first PhD in computer science and invented the genetic algorithm. I also spoke to Dave Patterson, the creator of the RAID architecture

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By Dennis Baron

Each year there’s a contest at the University of Exeter to find the most human computer. Not the computer that looks most like you and me, or the computer that can beat all comers on Jeopardy, but the one that can convince you that you’re talking to another human being instead of a machine.

To be considered most human, the computer has to pass a Turing test, named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, who suggested that if someone talking to another person and to a computer couldn’t tell which was which, then that computer could be said to think. And thinking, in turn, is a sign of being human.

Contest judges don’t actually talk with the computers, they exchange chat messages with a computer and a volunteer, then try to identify which of the two is the human. A computer that convinces enough judges that it’s human wins the solid gold Loebner medal and the $100,000 prize that accompanies it, or at least its programmer does.

Here are some excerpts from the 2011 contest rules to show how the test works:

Judges will begin each round by making initial comments with the entities. Upon receiving an utterance from a judge, the entities will respond. Judges will continue interacting with the entities for 25 minutes. At the conclusion of the 25 minutes, each judge will declare one of the two entities to be the human.

At the completion of the contest, Judges will rank all participants on “humanness.”

If any entry fools two or more judges comparing two or more humans into thinking that the entry is the human, the $25,000 and Silver Medal will be awarded to the submitter(s) of the entry and the contest will move to the Audio Visual Input $100,000 Gold Medal level.

Notice that both the computer entrants and the human volunteers are referred to in these rules as “entities,” a word calculated to eliminate any pro-human bias among the judges, not that such a bias exists in the world of Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the computers are called “participants,” which actually gives a bump to the machines, since it’s a term that’s usually reserved for human contestants. Since the rules sound like they were written by a computer, not by a human, passing the Turing test should be a snap for any halfway decent programmer.

But even though these Turing competitions have been staged since 1991, when computer scientist Hugh Loebner first offered the Loebner medal for the most human computer, so far no computer has claimed the go

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Richard Dawkins is the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He’s also a pre-eminent scientist, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is a fellow of New College, Oxford. Called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by the media, he is one of the most famous advocates of Darwinian evolution. His most recent book is The Oxford Guide to Modern Science Writing, a collection of the best science writing in the last century.

This is the second in a series of podcasts we’re running from an interview with Dawkins. Last time, he talked about Watson and Crick. Now, Dawkins looks at Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the modern computer. Dawkins has included a selection from Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence in his book.

Transcript after the jump.

DORIAN DEVINS: Alan Turing, another British scientist, computer mathematician…

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes. Alan Turing. Well, one of the fathers of the modern computer. So Turing was, I suppose, the nearest British approach to the father of the modern computer, apart from [Charles] Babbage in the 19th Century. Turing was the leading code-breaker in the Second World War at the Bletchley Park code-breaking establishment, which was phenomenally successful in breaking German codes. The famous Enigma code that the Germans used—the Germans never realized that their Enigma code had been broken. And the result of breaking the Enigma code was that Allied British and American generals would sometimes get German orders more or less at the same time as German generals were getting them. So it was a most extraordinarily valuable contribution to the Allied war effort. However, Turing committed suicide after the war because he was arrested for homosexual activity, and in those days in Britain, homosexual behavior was illegal. And Turing, who should have been given a medal and a knighthood, feted as the savior of his nation, was instead arrested for homosexuality and was given a choice between a two year prison sentence or being given a course of hormone injections which would have had some kind of feminizing effect and would have made him grow breasts. He chose instead to eat an apple that he’d injected with cyanide. One of the most tragic stories in British science. He was a great mathematician, a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant philosopher, and one of his contributions was the Turing Machine. Another one was the Turing Test, the hypothetical test for whether a computer could think; the so-called Turing Test, where you have a human in one room and an entity, which might be a computer and might be another human in another room, communicating by teleprinter. And the task of the real human, the subject, is to discover whether what he’s talking to is a computer or another human. The Turing Test, if the computer passes the Turing Test, what it means is that a human can’t tell the difference between the computer and another human. And the Turing Test you very often find mentioned in philosophical works about the nature of consciousness and machine intelligence.

DEVINS: It’s quite interesting to be able to read something by him, rather than just about him too.

DAWKINS: Yes. He was a real eccentric, a very, very strange man, and as I say, his downfall and his death is one of the most tragic and actually wicked stories that I know.

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Housecleaning on this blog continues, with only a few more hours left until Chinese New Year. I've got two more posts to finish, and they are both memes!


Six Weird Things About Me

Each person who gets tagged needs to write a blog post of their own 6 weird things as well as clearly state this rule. After you state your 6 weird things, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names.

Alvina tagged me for this meme last March! Basically, I've got to list six weird things about myself. You'd think this would be easy, since friends are forever making fun of me for stuff—like that I like instant mashed potatoes, for instance. But “weird” is in the eye of the beholder, and none of those things are weird to me. (Instant mashed potatoes are good!) So I’ve had to think and think.

(I do love real mashed potatoes, by the way. I love all potatoes; I just don’t draw the line at instant. I'm very loyal to my brand, however [Betty Crocker Potato Buds]. They do something bad to those others.)

Here are six things I've finally come up with that I agree are “weird.”


1. I’ve listened to Mariah Carey’s debut album at least 10,000 times in my life (and counting)

This is an actual calculation Damon did after interrogating me on my Mariah Carey-listening patterns one day.

This would not be weird if I were a big Mariah fan (which would be a different issue), but, in fact, I have a very tortured, almost angry attitude toward her. It would never occur to me to list this album in my top ten, nor Mariah as one of my favorite artists, yet I’ve listened to this album far more times than I’ve listened to any Tori Amos album, for example, whom I obsessed over for years. I just like to sing when I drive, and I spend a lot of time in the car, and this is my biggest fallback CD—probably since my driving life began. It cycles on repeat forever.

A close second would be Mariah’s MTV Unplugged album from 1992. I listen to it just as much but only bought it five years ago, so it can never catch up. Her Daydream album ranks high on the driving/singing list as well.

I don’t even like to sing these songs at karaoke! (It's not like I sound good on them.)

Part of what makes this weird is my own lack of self-awareness of it. Every time Damon points out the Mariah phenomenon, I’m surprised, myself, all over again.


2. I make coffee almost every day but don’t drink it. I pour it out.

“Everyone’s” addicted to coffee, but I was one of those people known for it. So, for some, the fact I stopped drinking it is probably weirder than the fact I’m still making it. It’s been almost three years since I quit (2/21/05), yet, whenever I mention it, my friends have nearly always forgotten and freak out again.

(Back when I was a caffiend, people would ask from time to time how much coffee I really drank, and I’d be all, “Only a cup a day; sometimes I don’t even finish it.” And they’d go, “Wow, that’s nothing!” Then one day some friends came over and saw my “cup.” They really made fun of that. It was basically a stein. I hadn’t thought about that.)

When I first quit coffee, I also quit making it. My body quit very suddenly—not my mind—so it wasn’t a matter of self-control. I was just surprised, day after day, to realize coffee now made me jittery. But after a while I wanted it, anyway. But it still made me jittery. So now I make it and don’t drink it.

Sometimes I carry two full mugs—one of coffee and one of green tea—into my office before sitting down to work: the coffee for comfort, the green tea to drink. Sometimes I make decaf instead, hoping then I won't waste. Even with decaf, I drink about a fifth.


3. I throw birthday parties for Keanu Reeves, even though I don't know how to invite him

I’ve only thrown three, and the latter two were jointly instigated by my partner in crime Julie. The first party I threw in high school, when Keanu turned 26 and I’d just discovered how happy his existence made me.

More than one friend—and Damon, too—has reported back to me this recurring conversation they’ve had with coworkers and friends. “So what are you doing this weekend?” someone will ask. –“Oh. I’m going to Keanu’s birthday party.” –“Oh my GOD!! How did you get invited!?!” –“No, you see, Keanu won’t be there . . .”

I actually had the opportunity to tell Keanu about this once, but I went mute, which friends tell me is a good thing. I’ve also had the opportunity to possess his cell phone number twice, so, in theory, one could invite him. But I have refrained. (These are stories for another time.)

I have two stories about the role Point Break (a Keanu movie) has played in my life, that I promised to blog two posts ago. The first is from when I sold Cutco knives. (Selling Cutco is not weird! Lots of college kids do that!) So, you know, the Vector Marketing people would tell you, anytime you had a sales presentation, that you should watch your favorite scene from a movie or listen to a favorite song first, to get you pumped up. So I would watch the big skydiving scene from Point Break. Afterward, I’d be all, “YAHH!! LET’S GO SELL SOME KNIVES!!!”

My second Point Break story actually makes my next item.


4. Before I saw Point Break for the first time, I had only cussed six times in my life

Afterward, that very same day, the number shot up to thirteen. I was fifteen. We were in a mall. I stayed mute for the first forty minutes after we came out—overwhelmed by the universe that had just been revealed to me (and by the miracle of Keanu's existence). What came out when I finally opened my mouth was seven explosive f-words in a row. Followed by another twelve minutes of silence before I could start interacting normally.

I am not one to get attached casually. But I’m very loyal. Keanu is my man to this day.

I know, to a lot of people, the point of interest here is that I kept count of how many times I cussed. Until early freshman year of college, I could tell you exactly when and for what reason each instance occurred (there'd been 17 by then)—and exactly which words were used. Most of the first six were experimental—just to hear what they sounded like in my voice. (Ditto, the only time I've ever used my middle finger, it was to see if my hand made the shape.)

After college began, life got a lot more stressful. I lost track around 21 or 22 (which was during the third week). Then there was no more counting.

(I don’t really cuss today.)


5. I think I can’t see

I get my eyes tested regularly and supposedly can see just fine (with contacts). Damon, however, has better than 20/20 (uncorrected), so he can read road signs from much farther away. His whole family is used to this, but it bothers me.

I recently realized, I think I can’t see to the point where I don’t even try to see. Like with my camera. I trust my camera to see, so I point the camera and tell it where to focus. Then Damon looks and says, “Hey! This is blurry!” and we discover the diopter (which corrects people’s vision in the viewfinder if they want to not wear glasses) has gotten spun around. This happens often, but I never notice, because I don’t try to see. (The camera takes the same pictures, anyway; it’s only the viewfinder that changes.)

There is a bit in the book Tangerine where the kid can see fine (through his thick glasses), but his mom thinks he can’t, so she keeps filling out disabilities forms for him when he transfers schools. It almost keeps him off the soccer team. That’s like me, except I’ve internalized the mom.

Last year I told Damon he can make fun of my vision from now on only if he uses positive language. So he has to say, “Because you can see,” instead of “Because you can’t.” It’s subtle, but it works.

I can see!!


6. Even though I know nothing about sports, I am good at choosing winning teams

Woo hoo!! I am awesome at this! I have two methods, and they make my sports-savvy friends nuts. The first is if I know nothing about the teams except their names. I go unfocused and listen to the background chatter in my brain—that ceaseless sports commentating I usually try to tune out. Then I pick the team name that sounds more like what a sports announcer would say. “So-and-so beat the So-and-so’s today in a something-something upset.” Or, “So-and-so trounced the So-and-so’s in a stunning yibba-yabba victory!”

This method is not great (I wouldn’t bet money on it), but it works a heckuva lot better than whatever the guys are doing when they pick their March Madness seeds (or whatever that chart is called that Damon puts in front of me). Heh. And they do bet money.

(Mike once told me they've done experiments where trained monkeys also do better at choosing those winners. Nice.)

My second method is more accurate. I believe in the Power of Story. That is to say, I believe sports games operate according to the same laws of the universe that govern the rest of our lives, and that all these highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, setbacks and buildups are mysteriously calculated to add up to great stories. To keep you hooked. So if you tell me a little of the two teams’ backstories, or even how the game's been going so far, I will tell you the outcome based on what would make the best story.

I have won bets with this. I took a bet with Damon’s stepfather once, second-to-last inning, that the Angels would . . . um, still win in spite of the fact they were currently losing by six runs. How Damon’s family jeered! That was one sweet dollar D’s stepdad gave me. (The backstory there was that the Angels were winning miraculous games-from-behind all season and were headed for the championships; it seemed too early for the pattern to stop.)

(Damon told me immediately, however, based on the backstory of his own family, that it would not be a good idea to gloat.)

This past Sunday, Damon asked me, “So who do you think will win the Super Bowl today?”

“Who’s playing?”

“The New York Giants and the New England Patriots.”

Hm. Both sounded like winning announcer-voice names. “The Patriots have won a lot lately, right?”

“Yes. How'd you know that?”

“One of my writer friends keeps sending me incomprehensible Patriots references—like, for the last couple years. I think the Giants will win. I think everyone’s tired of hearing about the Patriots.”

Damon got some kind of cat-that-just-ate-the-mouse look on his face. “Does it change your answer to know that the Patriots are on the verge of making history with this game? They’ve been undefeated all season, so if they win the Super Bowl, . . .” (I don’t remember the rest of his explanation. It went mushy in my ears.)

“No one’s ever done that before?”

“One team has. The Dolphins.”

“How long ago was that?”

“In [the 60s or 70s].” (Again, I don't remember what he said. But it didn't sound that long ago.)

“Has anyone else been in the running since? Like had a perfect season and gotten to the Super Bowl?”

“Nope. It’s really hard to go undefeated all season.”

“Then the Giants will win. It’ll be more heartbreaking for the Patriots to lose, and it will make it that much bigger a deal when the next team wins. I predict the next team to have an undefeated season will win the Super Bowl.”

“But that might not happen again in our lifetimes!”

What does that have to do with the Power of Story??

“Let’s bet,” I said, now that I had gone to the trouble of picking a winner. “What are the odds, like that bookies are giving?”

“[Friend’s name redacted] [Benji] says the Patriots are favored to win, four-to-one.”

“So whatever I win has to be four times as good as whatever you’d win?”

“Yes.”

(Note: I have since thought about this, and this is not right at all. If I bet $1,000, I would win $4,000. But if Damon bet $1,000, he would only win $250. So whatever I won should have been 16 times better than what Damon would win!)

(Wait. Is that right? We don’t have a bank or outside party to pay us. That seems too indirect.)

“What should we bet?” Damon asked.

This question kept resurfacing over the next couple hours. Even by halftime (none of which I watched), we still had not decided. “Favors,” Damon finally concluded, “to be named and claimed whenever.”

Wow. “And if I win, you have to do four favors for me, and if you win, I only have to do one?”

“Yup.”

I liked that.

“Well, you were right!” Damon’s voice came booming up the hall later, which meant the game had ended. “The Giants won!”

“Did you doubt me?”

Damon chortled, even though I was being serious. “No,” he denied. “I didn’t know.” (Which means he doubted me.)

Now I get four favors!

What should they be??


(Okay!! I totally figured this out! If I had bet one favor and lost, then I’d have had to do one favor. But if I had bet one favor and won [which I did], Damon—as the favor bank—would have to pay out four. But if Damon had bet one favor and won, he’d only get one-fourth of a favor! So it wasn’t like we each put up a favor, because then he’d owe me five favors; or I’d owe one-and-a-fourth. It was like I placed my one bet against Damon, who was the favor-gambling bank.)

(Whew! Sports betting is hard work!)


I'm done with this post! Now, to tag six people!!

Brian (aka "Money")
Bus
Lee
Jennifer
Stella
Annie
and, for bonus, even though she doesn't have a blog, I'd like to hear six weird things about "e!"

If you don't want to do this in your own blog because your content is too focused, you can just post the answers here, in these comments! I don't mind. ;)

Love,
rita

One more post left. Go! Go! Go . . .

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I spent fifteen minutes today learning the end dance moves to High School Musical. I've got the gist now. I'll probably try it again tonight. big cheesy grin Who's in for a pyramid dance formation? (Irvin? Karen?! I need backup!)

This movie is kinda terrible; but also kinda wonderful. We just watched it two nights ago. (We saw High School Musical 2 a few months ago—at Calvin's place, haha.)  The song "Stick With the Status Quo" is by far the best thing in this one—in terms of melody, lyrics, message, choreography; everything. Oh, man, it's so good! I get giddy. I've watched this track seven times already. I think I have to buy this movie, just so I can watch this track always.

This song takes the tired old premise I usually hate—about high school cliques being so rigid and everyone being so locked into their roles—and translates it into mass hysteria, with one guy's mini-rebellion creating a huge ripple effect of mini-rebellions in every circle. Anarchy; I love it! It makes me buy into this world, just so I can have the fun of seeing its rules get broken.

(Also: that turn of everyone wanting to hear your secret but then turning on you the second they do; I love that, too!)

I have to say that while 2's story was weaker (and the dialogue was horrible), the song-and-dance numbers in that sequel were fairly consistent*—with just the one travesty. ;) Whereas, in the first one, there's really only two shining song-and-dance numbers—"Stick With the Status Quo" and Ryan and Sharpay's callback number, which cracks me up. The others . . . have their moments.

But the end group sing [oh, that makes three; I can't count] is made for kids to want to dance along. It begs you to stand up and learn the moves, and they're really sellin' it in that beaming Disney way that calls to my inner upstanding youth. I could feel the urge—and the embarrassment—of wanting to get up and sing. I'm not one to let embarrassment get me down.

"We're all/ in this/ to-gether! Dah dah dat! Dah dah dat! Dah dah dat! Dah dah da-ahhh!"

The best character in this series is Zeke by far, the jock who confesses he loves to bake. Oh, man. And my second favorite is Ryan (who grew up to look the way Macaulay Culkin should have). I'm not a fan of the main guy, but those two?? *love*

Why don't they use Zeke more? Even his singing (if that is his singing) is better than all the others'. And that's sayin' somethin! He doesn't deliver a bad line or facial expression ever, in the few bits they give him. He rocks!!


And that is my rave about High School Musical.

I told you I don't let embarrassment get me down. :D

r

P.S.
Sharpay is a lot better and more fun in this storyline, too. Hilarious, actually. You know what? They made her and her brother too powerful at the Country Club, in High School Musical 2. In the high school setting, you feel for them. (You know? Their world was perfect before these people came along.)

Plus, being that little bit younger makes their ridiculousness that much cuter. :)

P.P.S.
Oh! Look what I can do! I can post a YouTube link to the big group sing I'm talking about!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7zzbB17Fvo
("We're All In This Together")

Quality isn't great, but you get the idea. The first time they do the chorus routine is one minute in, and the best is two minutes in, when they show the whole sequence clearly. (Damon's been egging me on, by the way. He's home sick with a fever, but is also full of advice about which foot to turn on. Contrary to what you'd think, embarrassing stuff is actually easier when someone's watching.)

And here, for good measure, is Ryan and Sharpay's callback audition:

"Bop to the Top"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAM-rh6B5DU

(They're the brother-sister act that rules the school's drama scene—until the new girl and this jock mess up their perfect world.)

Oh, and you need this link, too:

"Stick to the Status Quo!!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymNVMSBhFHc&feature=related

The setup for this is that the whole school has just found out the school's star basketball player has landed a callback audition for the musical; which means he auditioned in secret. Haha. The first guy to sing here is my favorite, Zeke!


:D Cheers!
r

Pictures in this post were lifted off the Web. I don't remember the sites, but they're the same promo pictures circulating everywhere. I wish I could find one of Zeke!

Calvin, I know you're secretly practicing.

Emmie, you better be watching!!


* I really don't remember how good the numbers in High School Musical 2 were. I guess we'll be renting that next!
 

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