While everyone else was biking, jumping, kneeboarding etc....

...I was finishing up Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges with an intro by Douglas Hofstadter, which I've been reading since March. 758 pages and about an inch and a half thick! I kind of think maybe I blogged about it in the past, but never mind. I've been reading it for so long you've probably forgotten whether I did or not, too. I picked it up to figure out how indignant to be or not to be with the movie "The Imitation Game" which is based on it. I enjoyed the movie, but the romantic emphasis was on Turing's relationship with a woman during his time as a Second World War code breaker. I thought maybe the filmmakers had made that up, as in addition to being the person perhaps most responsible for the advent of modern computing, Turing was gay. I was all set to be righteous about Hollywood bamboozling, but no. He did actually get engaged to a woman at Bletchley Park, and he really was involved with her, it wasn't just cover. He finally decided he couldn't go through with it due to being more sexually attracted to men, and told her why, and they remained friends. So I satisfied that curiosity, but it wasn't just his life that kept me reading -- Hodges also covers a lot of computing history that  I found fascinating. For example, one of the designs for an early computer that was considered used something called a "mercury delay line" for memory. I must have read that part in May and I don't clearly recall the explanation of how it worked, but the part that stuck was that there were some really weird and wonderful alternative routes to computer memory explored in those early days. Plus, Turing's connections with the British Secret Service make a large dose of period politics necessary. Hodges is terribly thorough, but there were a lot of British cultural references that he assumed didn't need explanation, so there were quite a few stretches where I either spent as much time with Wikipedia as with the book, or just stumbled through guessing meanings by context. The British school system, for example, is very puzzling. Even though I have gotten the main structures in mind by reading other British literature, Hodges gave so much detail that, paradoxically, it was more mystifying than if he had skimmed over things. Casually referring to a"Tripos" for example. Huh? (According to Wikipedia, "At the University of Cambridge, the term Tripos  refers to undergraduate examinations which qualify an undergraduate for a bachelor's degree." Ooooookay. So does that mean every university has their own degree system, with their own terminology? Questions kept leading to more questions. I suppose that was appropriate, given the book's title:)