M.J. Rose

The man called Alan Turing was certainly a genius: He foresaw the power and influence of computers – as well as how they would work. He also lived a life of persecution for being a homosexual, he was eventually arrested and forced into chemical “castration”. They say he committed suicide by lacing an apple with cyanide (his favorite story was Snow White and The Seven Dwarves.)

But the most interesting thing about Turing is that he was the first person to ask the question: Will machines someday be able to think like humans? And if so, will they be victims of prejudice too?

The Turing Problem

from RadioLab

“100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn’t kind to Alan Turing. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted under a British law that prohibited “acts of gross indecency between men, in public or private.”

The Letters of Utrecht

The Letters of Utrecht project publishes a poem of the local poet’s guild in the stones of a street in the center of the town of Utrecht, The Netherlands. One character per stone, one stone per week…

Forever.

There is a new documentary that is attempting to solve one of the most intriguing mysteries in the world. Suzanne Taylor’s documentary What On Earth? Inside The Crop Circle Mystery won the Best Feature Documentary Award at the UFO Congress Film Festival. For more than twenty years, Taylor has been part of the international community that gathers in England to study and document circle developments. Collectively, the group’s members are known as “croppies.”

Watch the trailer below –

WHAT ON EARTH? – crop circle movie trailer from Suzanne Taylor on Vimeo.

For more:

What on Earth? websites:
http://www.CropCircleMovie.com

http://Facebook.com/WhatOnEarth

Trailer:
http://vimeo.com/22537956

Hi-res crop circle photos:
http://TheConversation.org/movie-images