Originally published at: Would Alan Turing even WANT to be on a £50 Bank Note? | Boing Boing
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Considering Turing died from eating a poisoned apple, ouch.
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Dear lord. I did not know that.
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Yeah, for a long time the assumption was he had poisoned the apple as a means of committing suicide, and a connection was made between the apple and Snow White (Turing apparently having spoken about how taken he was with the Disney movie when it had come out). However, I’ve seen some recent suggestions that the apple may have been accidentally contaminated with cyanide because he had been doing some project involving the poison (and got sloppy), or even that he was murdered by the British government because, having rejected him they didn’t want him taking his genius (and classified knowledge) to another country either.
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I’ve always been under the impression that they could not actually use the enigma machine because you never let on you know how they start a certain letter in such a certain way gave them the free … guess what but no don’t do it…
that was such a thing it still is… but
pending the last year or two of his existence undergoing forced ‘chemical castration’ by way of experimental estrogen treatments.
This is not entirely true- as the article you link states, the treatment lasted a year and then stopped, and Turing lived another year or so before his death.
Yeah, I read this right after your post. Apparently, a later inquest determined that he was likely killed by cyanide inhalation. Apparently he was quite sloppy when it came to handling dangerous chemicals. Also, they apparently never even tested the apple for traces of cyanide!
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Ha, so just a little chemical castration, then! 
No joke, though, the effects of this kind of torture last long beyond the injections. Induced/chronic depression beyond the course of treatment is a common side effect.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19768354.2018.1427626
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Yeah! - for reasons you state - If not suicide (or accident) – I’m always a fan of any good Alan Turing conspiracy, too.
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It’s pretty plausible - I mean, it’s not like the CIA/British security services don’t have form for that sort of thing…
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Not sure why or how I misread that - but I read as “don’t have foam for that sort of thing”
I would fear government foam!
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I might take issue with this bit: “ He then conceived the basic structure for computers and saw the future of artificial intelligence.”
I think Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace might raise an eyebrow about that, especially Ada, who pretty much invented machine programming.
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Von Neumann entered the conversation…
Or you know Roger Bacon or someone. There is no one person who conceived these ideas which were floating around since time immemorial and mulled over by many. Some people made more concrete contributions as the fields accreted knowledge, praxis, and technology, but there is no person no great man nor great woman.
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It’s full of cyanide and LSD.
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